On 1/25/07, Oren Beck orenbeck@gmail.com wrote:
All of my scenarios are to pick brains for getting such projects either assembled by others or getting directed myself to do these things.
I just found the MorphixLiveKiosk http://www.morphix.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&...
There is also a seemingly easy to use remaster setup for Puppy Linux. I haven't tried either of these, but they look promising for a good starting point. I've run Puppy, and it's pretty dang fast. I've never mastered my own LiveCD before, but the pages on puppyos.com make it look fairly easy.
Jon.
On Sat, 2007-01-27 at 13:05 -0600, Jon Pruente wrote:
I just found the MorphixLiveKiosk http://www.morphix.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&...
There is also a seemingly easy to use remaster setup for Puppy Linux. I haven't tried either of these, but they look promising for a good starting point. I've run Puppy, and it's pretty dang fast. I've never mastered my own LiveCD before, but the pages on puppyos.com make it look fairly easy.
I have been working on the Debian Live project for a year and can say with reasonable certainty (and pride) that is the easiest way to make a live CD. It has support for making live CD's, network boot images, and USB/hard drive boot images.
You can, for instance, generate an ISO with whatever desktop environment that you prefer by merely invoking the make-live utility with the appropriate package list. And lets say that you, for instance, would additionally like Wireshark on the CD: you merely list that as an additional package that you would like included in the ISO. For example:
$ sudo make-live -a amd64 -d etch -p gnome-core --packages wireshark
The above command will generate an ISO built from the latest Debian Etch release packages with only the most important gnome packages and additionally Wireshark included.
Personally, my interest in Debian Live has been in the network boot functionality and have, in fact, used it for Internet kiosks as you have suggested. Only, no CD-ROM drives needed.
And then there is the old standby of remastering your own Knoppix: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8081 there are other articles on this. Google "knoppix remaster howto" or substitute in your LiveCD distro you want to start with.
On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 09:41 -0600, Brian Kelsay wrote:
And then there is the old standby of remastering your own Knoppix: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8081 there are other articles on this. Google "knoppix remaster howto" or substitute in your LiveCD distro you want to start with.
"Remastering" is nothing more than process of extracting the ISO, modifying it, and re-compressing it. It can be done with any Live CD including Debian Live. Most of the instructions you will find using Brian's Google query are generic enough to use anywhere.
However, there is a better way.
The beauty of Debian Live is that off-the-shelf packages do not need any specialization to work with the ramdisk environment. In the Knoppix world, they take Debian packages and heavily modify their /etc/init.d scripts to come up with the KNOPPIX boot sequence - this includes fundamental changes to the standard hardware detection stuff done in a regular Linux distro. In the Debian Live case, we mount a normal Debian root filesystem image, modify it to be "live" in RAM, and then hand control off to the normal /new_root/sbin/init and it boots as though it's running from a hard disk as it normally would. This means that almost no effort is required to get any software in the Debian repositories (57,000+ packages) to work in the Live environment.
And that's to say nothing of the benefit of having a good, clean rootfs directory built from the latest repositories to begin with; no need to go through a decompression process.
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Brian Kelsay -
Jason D. Clinton -
Jon Pruente